As businesses grow, so too do their requirements for the storage of data. Storage area networks (SANs) are a scalable solution to this problem, allowing additional storage devices to be added as the need arises. SANs contain storage devices and servers forming a network configuration. SANs provide a mechanism through which all of a business' storage devices may be made available to all of the servers in the business' computer network. The servers in a SAN are coupled to the computer network of the business and act as a pathway between the end user and the stored data. Because stored data does not reside directly on any of the SAN's servers or the servers of the computer network external from the SAN, server power is utilized for business applications, and network capacity is released to the end user. Since there is no central processing bottleneck and many storage devices may be connected to the SAN, the SAN is scalable.
One of the major challenges for the designers of SANs involves their configuration and management. Due to the ever growing number of components in a scalable SAN, the changing state of those components, and the multitude of physical and logical relationships between components, creating a topology of the SAN which a system manager can use possesses a difficult task. Prior art SANs do not have the ability to automatically create a current topology providing recognizable identifiers for the connected components. As such, system managers are forced to create associations between the world wide name of particular host bus adapters (HBAs) and the servers that are connected to them.
At best, in a SAN in which the components are connected through a fibre channel, the communication protocol of the fibre channel provides a means at the storage array for linking a world wide name (WWN) of a host bus adapter (HBA) to an identifier of the storage array, but the protocol does not provide any information about the server connected to the host bus adapter and therefore does not define a usable topology for the SAN.